A Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition In Chinese Children’s Product Advertisements

In modern economic society, advertisements appear almost everywhere. In order to persuade potential consumers to buy their products or services, advertisers utilize all the verbal and nonverbal symbols in advertisements. As an important subject in linguistics, pragmatic presupposition is employed by advertisers to strengthen the power of persuasion and promotion in advertising because of its characteristics of uni-directionality, subjectivity and concealment, etc. Pragmatic presupposition can be used as a communicative strategy and its application in advertising is a case in point.Along with the development of pragmatic presupposition theory and its increasing application in advertisements, the study of Chinese advertising under pragmatic presupposition theory gets to be significant. There are many studies on Chinese cosmetics advertising, Chinese real estate advertising, and automobile advertising and so on. But the research on children’s product advertising is very few. Realizing the huge benefits of children market, more and more manufacturers begin to produce goods targeted to children. Consequently, advertising of children’s product gets its good opportunity to occupy the commercial market. Therefore, this thesis is focused on pragmatic presupposition in Chinese children’s product advertisements.Based on previous study of pragmatic presupposition, the author classifies the collected advertisements into five types from the perspective of consumers’ psychology. After quantitative analysis of the data, the author finds that behavior presupposition is the most frequently used pragmatic presupposition in Chinese children’s product advertisements. With the purpose of revealing the operational mechanism of pragmatic presupposition in children’s product advertisements, the author analyzes the samples in qualitative way. Finally, the author discusses the functions of pragmatic presupposition in Chinese children’s product advertisements comprehensively and thoroughly. The author hopes that:theoretically, this study can broaden the research scope of pragmatic presupposition and enrich the understanding of pragmatic presupposition and the study of children’s product advertising language; practically, this study can, on the one hand, help advertisers create more scientific and attractive advertisements, on the other hand, help consumers make rational decisions while purchasing; pedagogically. it can not only help the students majoring in linguistics or advertising get a better knowledge of presupposition theory but also spark inspirations for their further study.